Jamie Hicks

FOSSIL FUEL FINANCE REPORT 2020Financial companies are increasingly being recognized — by their clients, shareholders, regulators, and the general public — as climate actors, with a responsibility to mitigate their climate impact. For the banks highlighted in this report, the last year has brought a groundswell of activism demanding banks cut their fossil fuel financing, at the same time that increasingly extreme weather events have further underscored the urgency of the climate crisis.

This paper provides a stress-test template for financial supervisors to simulate potential losses on banks’ and insurers’ balance sheets under 6 different COVID-19 pandemic scenarios over the next 36 months. It develops the nature of these scenarios and provides loss estimates that can be used as inputs to analysis of banks’ and insurers’ balance sheets. While valuation losses and credit spreads have already moved dramatically in the past month, this paper is not designed to recalculate what is already modelled but rather provide a toolkit for financial supervisors and institutions to scenario plan the next 36 months.

Dairy Cattle’s Ecological Footprint Material to Investors as US and EU Policies Adjust

Company pay practice doesn’t yet live up to climate ambition, with the gap between stated ambition and demonstrable action widening.The energy transition is a challenge to the traditional business model of the oil and gas industry, and companies are increasingly exposed to transition-related financial risks.Over the past few years a number of new corporate ambitions have been announced relating to carbon emissions reductions, however, there have been only minor, incremental changes in terms of remuneration policy.

Canada’s oil sands have been a source of energy, good employment, and economic profit for decades. Oil sands mining operations, however, have also been a source of massive amounts of fluid wastes, currently contained in tailings ponds located in northern Alberta.

Corporate transparency has evolved and progressed considerably in the last three decades. Public expectations of the private sector have shifted also, with greater emphasis being placed on corporate purpose beyond profit.

For the world’s poorest people, the climate crisis is a water crisis that they are living with now.

In May 2019, the Climate Disclosure Standards Board (CDSB) and the Sustainability Accounting Standards Board (SASB) published the TCFD Implementation Guide: Using the SASB Standards and CDSB Framework to Enhance Climate-Related Financial Disclosures in Mainstream Reporting. By offering how-to guidance, the TCFD Implementation Guide aims to help companies enhance the robustness, consistency, comparability, and utility of TCFD implementation and reporting through use of CDSB and SASB’s market-tested frameworks, standards and resources.

This review assembled evidence of reporting practices on environmental matters in the first year of reporting under the EU NonFinancial Reporting Directive (NFRD). The review further explored opportunities for incorporating relevant aspects of the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures, (TCFD) recommendations into the NFRD and associated guidance so that reporting practices that serve both sets of requirements are consolidated. Both the NFRD and TCFD recommendations ofer authoritative requirements on environmental and climaterelated reporting through the mainstream financial report. The Commission is undertaking a fitness check of the corporate reporting framework in Europe, with findings expected in summer 2019. This review should also inform the new Parliament and Commission as they set priorities for 2020 and beyond.

Crises in the natural world have reached a critical level. Inaction now threatens the very existence of human society: the IPCC warns that averting the most serious consequences of climate change requires a radical overhaul of the global economy , while the OECD argues biodiversity loss is among the top global risks to society . The intersection between these crises deepens their breakdown: deforestation is the second largest source of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Meanwhile, growing inequality, the changing nature of work, and continued human rights violations are just some of the major risks facing global society and the financial sector that supports it.